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#EmbarassYourBestFriend: The Misspelled Hashtag That Launched A Million Embarrassing Tweets

'Ross Geller' tweeted a not-terribly-embarrassing collage of the 'Friends' cast. Other photos were much worse.

On Sunday night, a few high school girls started sharing bad photos of one another. This one, of one of the girls not looking her most photogenic, was a typical share. They added a hashtag to the tweets, #EmbarassYourBestFriend. (Yes, “embarass” with one r.) Within 24 hours, the term had taken off. Thousands of Twitter users — including Scrubs actor Zach Braff –began tweeting the worst photo (or video) they had of their best friends, and their best friends, of course, retaliated. Over the last two days, there have been over a million tweets with the hashtag attached, according to data from TopsyPro.

Some of the photos were like those shared by the tweens who appear to have started the trend: simply people at their least photogenic, but others were embarrassing on a whole other level: photos of people with their pants down, or their skirts up, with someone else whose pants are down, with drugs, on toilets, passed out on floors, passed out on bathroom floors, a few of which are collected here. And the tweets, of course, contain the Twitter handle of the person pictured. The hashtag remained #EmbarassYourBestFriend, but it could have been changed to #GetYourBestFriendFired or #RuinYourBestFriendsLife or #HowToLoseYourBestFriendInOneTweet.

Over a 48-hour period, #embarassyourbestfriend prompted over a million tweets, via TopsyPro

The most popular post, retweeted thousands of times according to Topsy Pro, is absolutely NSFW (not safe for work). Twitter user HQRRY tweeted a photo of his friend, captioned, “I walked in on him, I couldn’t help but snap it and laugh hysterically.” The NSFW(!) tweet links to a photo that contains nudity, what appears to be drug paraphernalia, and, um, a busy hand. The “best friend” pictured had contributed this photo of a shirtless HQRRY minutes before, saying “I’m gonna regret this, I just know it…” Indeed.

However, HQRRY and his friend seemed happy about the attention, congratulating themselves on “trending.” I blame reality TV.

Comedian Matt Bennett jokingly tagged his bestie, John Stamos of Full House fame, in this one.

In a pre-Internet world, the only way you’d likely be subjected to this level of public embarrassment would be if a close friend wrote a memoir and recounted delicate moments. Now, these things can be shared hyper-publicly instantly, and go viral within hours — which means you might want to avoid provoking those with the most dirt on you to share it with the world. And, as always, try not to let photos of you doing mortifying and potentially job-threatening things be taken in the first place. (“This is just between the two of us” is code for “I can’t wait to upload this to Facebook.”)

Of course, most of the worst photos I saw were not taken with anyone’s permission.

Over the years, there have been many sites devoted to gathering this kind of embarrassing material: micro-celebrity gossip sites like TheDirty and Campus Gossip, and amateur porn sites where people could post naked photos of their exes such as IsAnyoneUp. But those sites were fueled mainly by hate, a thirst for revenge and people who gossiped or shared photos maliciously. And they took some work and curation by their creators. This Twitter trend on the other hand happened incredibly quickly thanks to trending crowd-sourcing. And it involves people outing their good friends, and contributing photos publicly that could, in some cases, get their friends fired, and at the very least, cause them some serious digital discomfort. Who needs enemies with Facebook friends and Twitter followers like that?

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